??? Non sequitur

One side's "wisdom of the crowd", "truth" and "knowledge and democracy" is the other's "conspiracy theories", "disinformation". 🙁

You hope that will be the legal standard? I fear it.

There could have been better worlds, probably would have been if Clinton had won in 2016, but it isn't anywhere near as catastrophic as some people predicted.

What now? Why do you think the premise is true?

Suggested reading: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/

I thought Mozilla was a FOSS organization whose goal it was to defend an open Internet with free communication?

Here they are putting out a blog post that says "WhatsApp should use the power it has over its users to implement antifeatures that their users might not want and could remove if it were FOSS".

What the hell kind of world are we living in again?

Because DOS and later Windows used to be the only OS that was relevant for IBM PC compatible systems. Only later were eg. Unix-like systems developed for them.

Chrome has 65% market share (according to Statcounter), far from a near monopoly. Even if you add Edge (which you shouldn't because Microsoft could fork Blink at any time), you only get 70% for their web engine. Around 2003 or 2004, IE had like 95% market share (and many websites required Flash Player) and we now know that that was eventually defeated.

I am all for worrying about the decline of good things, but your scenario isn't something I'm worrying that much about.

My childhood was before smartphones but when the Internet already existed.

In my preteen and teen years, the Internet was more or less my only escape from my horrible offline life. I envy today's kids that they can access it everywhere.

Everyone who wants to take that possibility away from any children, go have sexual intercourse with yourself.

If it's free, you're the product. (In this case the target of propaganda.)

This used to not be true for things that were not only free-as-in-beer but also freely licensed; but nowadays literally the only reason why anyone in their right mind might want to edit Wikipedia is that they think they can influence public opinion that way, so it is definitely true there too.

I think frankly the AGPL shouldn't even be considered a free license. Merely running the program, even modified, shouldn't require you to publish the source code you run on your machine without distributing it.

In terms of practical advantages, a more permissive license will boost fediverse adoption by businesses, which I think is desirable.

Not to my knowledge. There are websites where that is the case, like most wikis and Stack Exchange, but not reddit.